


A Garden in Winter

by audreycritter



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death, Father-Son Relationship, Future Fic, Gen, but you know how death in comics works right, death be not proud you're not permanent or shit even in this story, hearing impaired jason, stories i might finish one day, tw: grief and lots of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22218631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Bruce doesn't do well with goodbyes.Death doesn't usually let him get to say them.(Then again, they're rarely for very long.)
Comments: 41
Kudos: 308





	A Garden in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> tw for major character death, but, as a beacon of hope to maybe entice you to read, it's a comic book story and the death doesn't quite stick. that said, it still delves heavily into the themes and processes of grief. 
> 
> this has been sitting in my documents for a while, being occasionally poked at. we'll see what happens with it.

Bruce Wayne seemed destined to live in a world determined to deny him farewells and final words. It had been that way with his parents and then with Jason, with Damian, and Tim.

So it was this time, too.

He got the call at work, Damian crying hysterically on the other end of the line. It flung him into frigid fear, because he could have counted on one hand the number of times he’d heard Damian cry at all.

It took more than one attempt to get information out of him, his heart thudding in desperate denial the whole time.

By the time he reached the hospital, Alfred was already gone.

For a man who prided himself on his ability to retain details, who had lived with the vivid memories of his first parents’ deaths, that afternoon perhaps should have been etched indelibly into his memory. But it blurred, and later, he could recall with precision the phone call— he had nightmares about the phone call— but the day otherwise was lost to him.

He didn’t even remember how he’d made it home that night, only that for once he didn’t think of the Cave first.

* * *

The ghost of Alfred was remarkably effective in keeping Bruce alive and functioning. It was as if he were being haunted by a kindly wraith, prodding him to keep going. In true Alfred fashion, it did not delay— it dragged him out of bed the very first morning.

When he collapsed later that night, dizzy and with rough, self-administered sutures, on the study floor, he didn’t stay there. Before, it would have been Alfred nudging him to his feet after his mute and automatic patrol. In some ways, it still was.

“I’m getting up, Alfred. I promise,” Bruce said to the empty room. Then he got up.

The furious rage of other loss was absent. Perhaps it would come for him later, when the grief had gained strength with age. It was grief in its infancy now, helpless and bewildered at the strangeness of an unrelenting universe. Yet, it was also the grief of old and dimming age— Bruce’s fifty-four years were packed with the experience of a man twice his age, three or four times, a dozen times. It was a grief that did not cry for comfort, did not rail against the world.

When he’d lost Jason he had broken his hand on Clark’s perfect jaw; he would have shattered it completely if Clark hadn’t rolled his head with the punch. He had dashed himself upon the craggy rocks then, the salt spray of an ocean of fury drowning him, and he had learned the lesson again: there was no consolation for this. The most gentle hand could never soothe enough, the most jagged fractures could never distract.

This time, he was resigned. He could see his life stretching ahead of him now, a life stripped down to the basics:

The four suits remaining in the closet, already paired with shirts and ties Alfred had set aside for the week. Bruce wouldn’t mess with these. He would merely send them away for cleaning on the weekend and then change the order he wore them in. His wardrobe outside of work would shrink to what would fit in a single drawer— socks, two pairs of sweats, a few tees, a robe. If anything was ruined by blood or wear, he would throw it away and replace it with another from the reserves.

Except, of course, the robe— it was comfortable and soft with years of use, restitched and mended almost as a running joke. This, he would wear until it was nothing.

Meals would be simple and monotonous.

He would cook plain chicken, eggs, rice and console the ghost of Alfred with the fact that at least he was eating.

There would be a routine he could trudge through, as long as he kept his head down and plowed forward.

Sleep. Work. Eat. Patrol.

There was one thing the ghost of Alfred couldn’t bully him into, because he shut it out and shrank from the cowardice in him. This cowardice, like the grief, was something he was resigned to.

He would not pick up the phone. He ignored the calls, the texts, the visits, until Dick grew tired of following him through the cave pleading, then shouting, and finally threw his hands in the air and stomped out.

Bruce was a coward because he knew they were hurting, too, and he couldn’t bring himself to make the call. Then the call after, then the one after that. Call after call until all the details of the funeral were arranged.

Even the word funeral was so bitter in his head, ringing like gunshot in his ears, that the one time he nearly worked up his nerve to begin he ended up retreating into bed and sleeping restlessly for ten hours.

Two days went by, then three, and Bruce slept, ate, patrolled like a machine. He was unwilling to disappoint Alfred by falling apart, the one thing Alfred had confided he was most afraid of for Bruce’s future. He buried his shame, because he couldn’t bury Alfred and risk losing the wisp of a ghost yet, should it slip away into the dirt with the coffin.

Not yet.

* * *

Damian was supposed to be in New Jersey in the midst of his first semester at Princeton. He’d come home for something in the Cave that week, because he was like all of them and couldn’t stop working even when he was working.

He didn’t come back home after that frantic, sobbing phone call. Bruce didn’t blame him, exactly. There was a list of strong possibilities of where Damian had gone instead— Jon’s, Dick’s, Steph’s. He even had some unlikely friendship with Cullen Row, and it was possible he’d gone to Cullen’s place just north of the Narrows.

(Perhaps the friendship wasn’t that unlikely— they were both, in their own ways, quiet and meticulous and part of a social fringe, sharing a love for subtitled TV shows and antique swords.)

Whoever he’d gone to, wherever he’d gone, Bruce wasn’t sure. He might have even gone straight back to Princeton and immersed himself in schoolwork to cope. Bruce told himself, in the flickers of time he thought of anything outside his next direct physical action, that Damian was an adult. In many ways, he had been for years, and his body and legal status finally caught him with him.

At least, Bruce thought Princeton was an option until the day he got the mail and opened the letter without thinking. College mail to the home address was intended as much for the parent, as for the student, Bruce assumed— it wasn’t even an intended violation of privacy as much as just an expectation that he was supposed to read it. The mail was another routine task, something to do that was not dealing with those things he steadfastly avoided.

It was a letter offering condolences, personally signed by the Dean because Damian was a Wayne; it offered brief instructions on resuming enrollment after the sabbatical offered for family emergencies.

Bruce set it aside.

Without warning, Damian showed up later that night.

It had been four days.

He didn’t knock— none of them ever did. All the ones who had moved away went in and out like it was still their home, which in other times was a comfort to Bruce. Even Stephanie, who had never lived there, had a key and passcode and simply let herself in.

Damian didn’t bother with pleading or shouting like Dick. He didn’t even offer a hug, like Dick had— Bruce had accepted that hug, even while ignoring attempted conversation.

“I’m taking care of everything,” he said simply. “It can’t go on like this.”

Bruce was a grown man with decades on Damian, his son, his youngest; he had more experience than he wanted burying people. He knew deep in his gut that this was unfair to the boy, even if the boy was a towering brick wall of a man. The breadth of his shoulders didn’t mean he was old enough for this.

Then again, Bruce didn’t think any of them were, didn’t think they ever would be. He felt all of eight years old again, fumbling in the dark for direction, passing the torch with a sense of profound relief to his companion. Never mind that the companion was also a child.

He felt a pang of guilt for the days he’d not known or bothered to know where Damian had gone.

Grief, in it’s duty-shirking phase of adolescence, led him to nod.

Damian would take over. Damian would see to details, call Dick like he always did for advice he didn’t want to ask Bruce for, and things would move forward.

There was a twinge of fear at the possible loss of the ghost leading him step by step, but now that it came to it, when had six feet ever been enough to keep his ghosts down?

If it did this time, then at least it wouldn’t be on his own head.

Four hours later, well into the small hours of the morning, he was at the computer when Damian returned and opened the bay of the jet.

He startled a little at Bruce being in the computer chair.

“I thought you had gone out,” he said, his face a mix of frightened and rebellious. It was that same old sneer that slipped into place, curling his lip whenever he was ready to fight.

“No,” Bruce said simply, watching him as he hefted the bag again onto his shoulder.

“I’m going,” Damian said, resolute. “I’ll come back when everything is settled.”

Bruce merely nodded, the tendrils of fear slipping away. Later, maybe, it would come back with a different shape. For now, he merely watched Damian’s gaze flicker uncertainly to him and then back toward the jet. He took a step toward it, and then stopped.

“I…” Damian began, hesitant now that Bruce couldn’t judge his expression. He started over. “It was wrong. It was…not how he would have wanted.”

Bruce knew. Bruce knew the ugliness of strokes, the loss of physical control and the way a human body spasmed on a muscular level as it shut down. He knew Damian had panicked so deeply at the state of things that he’d called 911 before Bruce’s office, violating a long-standing family rule about emergencies.

He said nothing, not because of cowardice but because his throat had tightened with a cottony thickness.

Damian left him in the damp, dim cave.

Bruce went to bed and later, when he woke to burn eggs and eat them anyway, he wondered if the predawn encounter had been just a dream. It felt enough like a nightmare to be one.

By evening, he genuinely wasn’t sure, and it could have been cleared up with a phone call but it was another phone call he couldn’t force himself to make.

The ghost vanished, replaced by dread.

He was drenched in it, at the prospect of any possible outcome, of every possible future. It paralyzed him. He skipped three meals, stayed in the cave until he wasn’t sure what hour it was, used the slick, gray rock of the wall to jam his shoulder back into socket.

Tim found him there, gasping on the mats, unable to tell where the physical pain started and ended as it melded with the rest of him until he was just one raw ache.

“Get up,” Tim said, without preamble. He sounded weary. “Go shower. The memorial service is in an hour.”

Just like that, the dread seeped out of him and the ghost returned. It chided him from the edge of the cave, tutting scoldingly, as he stared up at the distant netting and the dark cavern ceiling beyond it. He was on his back, his shoulder throbbing, and it was like coming back to himself.

Cold reality was bitter as lye; it burned and scalded everything it touched, but it was still familiar and better than the cloudy dread.

“Come on, Bruce,” Tim said, voice flat. “Shower. Suit. I’ll drive.”

Bruce swallowed and the ghost rattled at him from the steps, urging him to get up and keep going, keep breathing, keep functioning. He looked at Tim, dressed in a tailored black suit with his hair slicked back. It sharpened, rather than masked, the bruised crescents of lost sleep under his eyes. This was his boy, too, as much as Damian was— yet, this was also Alfred’s boy. Bruce had always known this one had a special place in the older man’s heart, a deep connection running between the two of them. Kindred spirits, maybe, but perhaps also timing: Tim had stepped into their lives when Bruce resisted a new connection, and Alfred yearned for one.

Bruce didn’t have a favorite child, though he knew they all joked that it was Dick. Alfred didn’t have a favorite grandson, but even Bruce would have joined them in teasing that it was Tim.

“Bruce,” Tim said, a note of angry begging creeping into his voice. He misunderstood the look Bruce gave him from the floor.

It was then that he hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the burn in his arm, and hauled Tim into a hug. There was a moment of resistance, stiff and stubborn, and then Tim sagged into him with a shuddering breath.

“I’m coming,” Bruce said. “I’m…”

Sorry, he meant to say. Sorry, though it wasn’t enough. Sorry for the way he’d shut down, sorry for leaving them stranded, sorry sorry sorry. Sorry he’s gone, sorry I wasn’t here, sorry I wasn’t there, sorry I can’t fix this.

It was too much to fit in such short syllables, the list of grievances too long and heavy. Saying it was like asking for forgiveness, and Bruce couldn’t bring himself to put that additional burden on Tim.

“I know,” Tim said anyway. “Me, too.”

Bruce squeezed and let him go. Tim stepped back, his eyes rimmed red. They went upstairs together in silence. They drove in silence, though Tim checked his phone a few times and then swore and threw it in the backseat. He didn’t offer an explanation, and Bruce didn’t ask. Bruce had ended up in the driver’s seat after all, and he watched the speed eat up miles of lined pavement and wished he was better at this.

Dread crept in at the thought that he had no backup anymore, no interpretive voice to sift through the mess and nudge him and mend bits. He kicked it away.

The memorial was small, short, precise. It was just the thing Alfred would have outlined for himself. For all Bruce knew, he had, and the plans had merely been applied.

It was one minute into the eulogy that Dick was giving in Bruce’s stead— yet another way Bruce had failed them— that Bruce realized Damian wasn’t there.

There were pieces of this puzzle that Bruce could have put together in a moment if he’d tried, if he’d even half-tried: Tim’s anger, Dick’s defeated slump, the casketless memorial service.

The details pestered him like mosquitos, annoying and biting. The dread loomed, flitting in like an insect full of disease. It threatened to stay and culture and grow ruin, destruction; body-wasting damage in the sting.

He swatted it all away, stepped up when Dick faltered with a hand pressed against his mouth, and let the waning ghost guide him one final time into what he ought to do— as Alfred always had.

Bruce took over, with a firm grip on Dick’s shoulder. Dick steadied under the touch and the relief in his eyes was every ounce of forgiveness Bruce would ever need. He, who prepared for everything, had nothing prepared for this moment. He delivered a stiff, awkward tribute and resolved it to be his last failure of responsibility. It had to be.

The safety net was gone.

* * *

Bruce found Jason making omelets, his guns in their holsters on the counter, as if making breakfast was something he’d done on impulse. His leather jacket was tossed over a nearby chair. There were hearing aids in his ears.

It had been three weeks since the memorial service, when Jason had abruptly left town without a word. That made two sons missing, and Bruce gave them their space as he thought they wanted, though it ate him alive. Without Alfred to recommend caution or trust, he forced himself to adhere to the words he could imagine filling the dining room.

The ghost lingered.

“Did you know when we were on the rocks, I used to stop by and have tea with him?” Jason asked. He didn’t bother with a greeting, but he did turn with plated omelets and sit down at the kitchen table. He slid one to Bruce.

Bruce shook his head.

“You gotta eat,” Jason said sternly.

“No,” Bruce said, shaking his head again. He picked up the fork. He didn’t begin eating; he let the metal handle warm in his tight grip. “I didn’t know.”

“Figures he would have been able to keep something from you, of all people,” Jason said with a wistfully fond half-smile. He shoved a bite of omelet into his mouth and chewed, while his expression darkened. He swallowed. “I tried for two weeks to convince myself I hated you all over again, after you royally fucked up even giving him a good send off. I told myself he’d been the only thing keeping me around, y’know. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

“I was in London staring at the Globe Theater when it struck me what would disappoint him the most: you, being left alone here. You always were the most important person to him.”

“Don’t, Jay,” Bruce said, and it was more pleading than commanding. Weeks he’d spent in an intricate waltz of _not thinking_ with the ghost and this crashed it to splinters like a battering ram, thinking of a world where the Globe stood and Alfred would never see it again.

Remembering that Alfred had considered _him_ a son.

“I dunno if it’s more for him or more for you, that I decided,” Jason went on anyway. “But you’ve always needed someone who could tell you no, and Dickie doesn’t count.”

Bruce didn’t argue, when Jason rose to clear his plate from the table. He took a bite of the omelet and then another.

The ghost faded from the room, content.

* * *

When Bruce hung the cape for the night, Jason shelved his helmet. They went up in single file and Jason went straight toward the kitchen; this disrupted Bruce’s recent routine, which was to go pass out in bed, but because he was curious, he followed.

Jason was pulling shots of espresso into porcelain cups from the espresso maker Bruce hadn’t touched, ever. Bruce stood in the doorway, watching him work— the nimble, work-rough fingers and confident motion made his chest and his own swollen knuckles ache.

Bruce tried to speak, cleared his throat, began again. “Did you clean that? First?”

“What? Did you say—” Jason turned, the tamper in his hand, his head cocked to the side. He took in Bruce’s face and then reached up and adjusted a hearing aid. “Sorry. What?”

Bruce swallowed.

“The machine— did you clean…it hasn’t been used it in a while. It needs to be…” the words died on his tongue, as he wrestled with not wanting to order his son around and not wanting to see him sick with water poisoning either.

Jason’s presence still felt transitory, like a rare migrating bird alighting in the yard for a breathless moment, before taking wing and soaring out of sight. It always did, these days.

“I cleaned it earlier,” Jason said. “Before I made myself coffee. This, by the way, is decaf, but we need to talk. Sit.”

Bruce sat.

He let himself drink in the sight of Jason hungrily, in a way he hadn’t earlier when he was still too stunned by the sudden arrival. Even before the memorial, Jason hadn’t been in the habit of staying in Gotham long. He’d taken to globetrotting, gone for long stints while he dropped postcards in the mail. It wasn’t unusual for him to show up at the Manor after a trip, so Bruce didn’t understand why it had been so jarring until he realized that it had been the mere act of finding Jason in the kitchen alone.

The shock was the absence, not the presence.

He watched Jason move.

Muscle rippled under the thin tank; there were scars dotting his shoulders. Nothing near the mess Bruce’s own shoulders were, but nonetheless marred by flecks of shrapnel splatter and a rough-edged burn. His shoulders had been broad and rounded when he’d been younger, but had taken on a defined leanness even with their breadth.

His hair was still dark and thick, but the soft curls Bruce remembered had been chopped off with military precision into tight, straight lines on his neck and around his ears; it left the hearing aids plainly visible and hard to miss. Bruce sometimes wondered if that was intentional, or a side effect of some other preference he couldn’t discern. He’d never asked.

It was like watching a stranger he wanted to know, which in some ways was how Jason had always come back into his life. Every first meeting had been a dissonant mix of familiarity and foreign experience, all chained to each other with the profound assurity that Jason was, regardless of every other detail, his son.

Bruce suddenly wondered if, when he’d come back from his first training circuit, Alfred had felt that way about him.

Then he forced himself to stop thinking about that.

With a flourish, Jason set coffee mugs on the table and then dropped into a chair with a weary slouch. Bruce picked up the coffee and studied Jason’s face. The clock said it was pushing three in the morning, and Bruce knew he probably looked as tired as Jason did— probably more.

The Pit might have restored many things to Jason, in the way of build and physical health, but for all that it had done, it had only done it to his age then. He’d looked young enough, still, with rounded cheeks and a smooth brow, that the mask had to have been partly to keep people from doubting him.

Now, Jason didn’t look old, but he didn’t look young either. His nose had been broken and poorly set at least once, his features had hardened enough that he looked wholly like a man and not like someone with remnants of childhood still shaping his frame. The stoniness softened, momentarily, when Jason glanced up and gave him a brief but warm smile.

“Take a picture,” Jason said, with a teasing kindness. “It’ll last longer.”

 _I want to_ , Bruce thought, remembering how often he’d dismissed Alfred’s insistence on documenting both significant and mundane moments.

Mentally, he kept going. He wasn’t ready to linger there.

“We gotta talk,” Jason said, scooting the chair back so he could lounge with his legs outstretched, crossed at the ankles. Bruce couldn’t see any weapons on him but he felt like the casual stance was deceptive somehow, not toward him, but something of habit. It was too precise in visual depiction of comfort or ease.

When he’d been younger, Jason had never sprawled like Dick or Bruce— he’d curled, into a tight little ball, to sleep. To read. To watch a movie, to ride in the car. Maybe it was that his safety in infancy had been so nebulous that it was defensive, perhaps he would have turned out the same way with another beginning.

“B? You awake?” Jason asked.

Bruce blinked.

“Drink up,” Jason said, pointing to the coffee. “It won’t keep you up but I need you awake for this.”

That phrase was uncomfortably rife with memories of needles, of drugs, of sutures and the smell of sanitizing alcohol, of feeling woozy and in pain and a hand on his forehead.

A shudder he couldn’t stop ran through him, and he shook himself.

“Hn,” he said, taking the coffee. The heat felt good on his sore hands, along his throbbing wrists.

“I considered putting this off,” Jason said. He was nursing his coffee, the mug half empty but still in his grip. “But I gotta tell ya, B. With the way you handle change, I don’t want to set a dangerous precedent.”

Bruce’s eyes narrowed at that.

“Nothing bad,” Jason said, holding a hand up. It was a motion of halt, or maybe of surrender. “Just. I have a life. I have things I wanna do.”

 _Good_ , Bruce thought fervently. His back felt lighter, a weird weightlessness on his spine, like he’d been carrying a bag of rocks he hadn’t known about and then someone had come along and cut the cords off of him.

Jason eyed him for a moment with a judiciary gaze, evaluating something. Then he finished his coffee and sat forward, elbows propped on the table.

“So, this is how it’s gonna work. I live in a room, I pick which one. Might be my old one, might not be. I’ll decide. Four days a week, I’ll cook. The other three days, your laundry, shopping— you’re on your own. I’ll stitch you up, I’ll set bones, I’ll bring you meds if you’re really banged up. I do whatever the hell I want with the rest of my time, within the shaky perimeters of our usual allegiance to the law. We clean together.”

“Deal,” Bruce said, without hesitation. Later, maybe, he could evaluate how fair this was, what he might fight him on, but for now all he was hearing was Jason saying _I’m staying_.

Jason looked a little taken aback by the quickness, and for the first time since they’d walked into the kitchen— the first time since Bruce had seen him sixteen hours ago, really— he appeared uncertain.

“I’m not…I know I’m not…” Jason looked down at his hands clasped on the table. “I’m not trying to replace…him.”

“I know,” Bruce said. “I know.”

He wanted to stop talking about it, to move on. He wasn’t sure if Jason wanted to, so he was quiet.

“He just wouldn’t want you…alone. Like this,” Jason said. He pressed a hand over his eyes. “I think he really thought he’d outlive you, B. I think we all did.”

“Stop,” Bruce said, softly pleading. He’d thought for all of two seconds he was ready and able to hear for Jason’s sake, at least, but it was nearly instant in the way it sucked him into a merciless maw of razor teeth.

“Yeah,” Jason said, equally soft. He shrugged and when he spoke again, it was in a decided tone. “Anyway. I’m staying to help. I figure we give it a month, and if we haven’t killed each other by then, we see where to go from there.”

A month.

He had a month.

There were voices and footsteps in the hall. Jason, even with hearing aids, caught them a half second after Bruce— their attention snapped to the door in unison.

No alarm had sounded, so it was someone with codes to the house.

“Damian,” Bruce said, the instant the voice was close enough to recognize. Some of the tension vanished from Jason’s expression, his hand at the knife on his hip relaxed. So he’d heard the sounds, but not been able to discern voices at the distance.

Another raised in argument.

“Is that…” Jason demanded, his voice husky; they were mere syllables of rough stone scraping together.

The kitchen door swung open.

It was Damian, youth evident on his face. There was a taped gash slicing across one eyebrow, surrounded by mottled bruise.

Bruce rose to his feet, all the deferred dread of the past weeks looming and then devouring him like a storm rolling across the prairie fields at the Kent Farm. Dread like a blizzard, icy and breath-sucking— mixed with a selfish, sickly sort of joy.

“You mother _fucking_ al Ghul _brat_ ,” Jason hissed, rising to his feet as he, too, saw what held Bruce frozen.

“Language,” a familiar voice intoned, though it was tinged with weariness like his heart wasn’t quite in it.

Next to Damian was Alfred, with a shock of strawberry blond hair prematurely receding at the temple, a face unlined except with the hard creases of military stress near his eyes, which were flecked with eerie, unnatural green.

“It took longer than I anticipated,” Damian said. None of his children knew how to say hello, a trait he felt was unfairly inherited. “There were…complications.”

“You _knew_?” Jason demanded. He pivoted on his heel so quickly that in the vast dumbness holding Bruce in stasis, he genuinely didn’t see the hit coming. It was a solid punch and forced him to stagger back, muscle memory yanking his fists into fighting readiness rather than clutching uselessly at his jaw, even while his brain shouted _no!_ and chanted _your son your son your son_ like a desperate reminder.

Bruce didn’t want to hit him. He didn’t intend to hit him. He forced his hands to unclench, his fingers falling loose at his sides.

Because he was glaring at Bruce, Jason didn’t see the punch coming toward his own head like a piston. Damian yelled, a bitten-off warning cry, and then Alfred hit Jason so hard in the ear that Bruce heard the hearing aid crack before the howl.

“Stop!” Bruce roared.

Jason slumped against the table cradling his ear, and as Bruce caught Alfred’s arm, his gaze met Damian’s wide eyes.

Damian looked like an overwhelmed child with every ounce of him, rather than a mature college student. Out of his depth, waiting for Bruce to give him an order, his lip already curling to argue out of habit even while he hungered for direction.

“As I said,” he said tautly. “There were…complications.”


End file.
